Kaya/Muae – serie

A bestseller in New Zealand and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, Sia Figiel's debut marks the first time a novel by a Samoan woman has been published in the United States. Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su'ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies of Samoan women and culture. Told in a series of linked episodes, this powerful and highly original narrative follows 13-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village and comes to terms with her own search for identity.”A story of Samoan puberty blues, in which Gauguin is dead but Elvis lives on.” –Vogue Australia”A storytelling triumph.” –Elle Australia

Maps of City and Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara presents the complete texts of "Big Head" and "Maps of City and Body," two of Uyehara's most acclaimed shows. In "Big Head," Uyehara questions the logic of political and personal rhetoric by exploring the relationship between Japanese American internment camps and post-September 11th racial violence. Maps of City and Body takes on subjects ranging from the trails left behind by childhood kisses to the reimagining of a grandmother's fiery suicide, to explore how memories mark our bodies. In both works, Uyehara remains unflinchingly attentive to the transformative details that give our lives shape. This selection of Uyehara's performance pieces has been designed to function as both experience and documentation. It includes images from her performances, as well as detailed stage directions. It also includes detailed descriptions of Uyehara's other public art investigations, as well as a conversation with dancer/scholar Yutian Wong, a chronology of readings and stagings, and a bibliography. Maps of City and Body is the first in a series of books from Kaya Press on Asian diasporic performance artists.

Brawling, street-wise prose poems push the boundaries of narrative form, taking the reader through the physical and psychological landscapes of East Los Angeles.

In 1994 and 1995, South Korea experienced an alarming upsurge in industrial accidents. This text examines the human cost of economic development in Asia, asking where the wealth of Asia is being directed.

Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there’s the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one’s head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement.Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His work has been published in numerous publications, including Fiction magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café’s Poetry Slam.“[Rutkowski’s] sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity.”— Publishers Weekly“Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with.” — Molly Peacock